Blue White Illustrated

sport that's as subjective as college foot- ball, a sport in which a program's suc- cess depends on its ability to impress others, from pollsters to selection com- mittee members to blue-chip recruits, perception and reality are closely linked. In other words, optics matter. They matter for everyone, and they really matter at Penn State right now. As their visit to Ann Arbor showed, the Nittany Lions do not presently have the kind of team that can compete with the likes of Michigan. The only way they are going to compete with Michigan in the future is by recruiting comparable players and developing them at a pace that allows those players to maximize their poten- tial rather than forcing them into action prematurely in order to ;ll some gaping hole that just opened up in the depth chart. The way to do that, if you're James Franklin, is to create a sense of upward mobility that seems realistic to recruits. And not just to any recruits, but to the four- and ;ve-star prospects who have their choice of schools and who you are going to need if you expect to do battle with the best teams in the Big Ten. Franklin is recruiting against the likes of Urban Meyer and Jim Harbaugh. Meyer has won three national champi- onships, while Harbaugh has an Orange Bowl victory and a Super Bowl appear- ance on his resume. Franklin began his head coaching career at downtrodden Vanderbilt and has spent the past two- plus years rebuilding a sanction-de- pleted Nittany Lion program, so his resume isn't as glittery as that of his ri- vals. He's got other things to sell, such as Penn State's history of on-;eld success, its strong academic track record and one of the most engaged fan bases in the country, but what he really needs is a way to frame the team's on-;eld results – wins and losses alike – as part of an optimistic narrative. The Michigan game might have ;t that narrative if the Lions had managed to hold the Wolverines in the low 30s. A=er all, this was a team that had won its nonconference games by a combined margin of 159-45 and would go on to beat Rutgers by 78 points in October. But the game got away from Penn State in the fourth quarter and the ;nal score was as lopsided as many had feared it would be. Fortunately for the Nittany Lions, the S I T E L I N E S • B W I . R I V A L S . C O M R E A D E R S D I S C U S S P S U ' S P R O G R E S S Simply stated, if you understand the process then you'll understand the progress. Too many fans expected mir- acles the day the sanctions were lifted, as if to say "The sanctions are over so NOW we can start competing for the national championship THIS season!!" That was never the case, as much as Franklin tried to explain it to the fans and media. But if you are realistic and look at the youth and inexperience of the team, and then look at the game- by-game incremental progress being made, THEN you can appreciate the positive direction in which Franklin is moving the program. The fact that the media and some re- ally uninformed fans have been hinting at Franklin's firing still amazes me, al- though in this day and age there's not much that the media does that amazes me anymore. At one point Saturday I was pointing out to my girlfriend how many kids on the field on defense at that moment were either freshmen or redshirt freshmen and I really sur- prised MYSELF at how many there were. The staff is doing a really great job with the cards they have been dealt as far as injuries and inexperience, and as long as the players and the staff continue to BELIEVE in the process, then we fans will continue to see progress. SJLuvsLions Anyone who does not see progress is not watching! Things they were not ex- ecuting right before they are doing bet- ter. They get to the ball, definitely tackling too high, but they are at the right position. Just keep on maturing and growing! AFRich It is not just Penn State and the PSU media and fan base that are hyper-crit- ical and not patient. LSU fired Les Miles after two games. He had a pretty good run at LSU and didn't make it through the season. Notre Dame is struggling this year and they now are talking about running Kelly out of town. This is after last year where the fans were super thrilled with what Kelly did with the 2015 team. USC was ready to run their coach out of town in less than a year. Texas looks like they are going to run their coach out of Austin after three years. It is the nature of the business. Coaches are no longer given five years to prove themselves. You need to win, and you need to win quickly. Then, when you set the bar high, you had bet- ter make sure you keep winning and meeting the expectations of the fans, boosters and the media. I think Kirk Ferentz is a great coach and does a great job at Iowa, but I am not sure most of the traditional football powers would have kept Ferentz around after he had a few average to below-average seasons. Also, Franklin came into this situa- tion and talked a huge game. He wanted to create excitement throughout the program, which he thought would help with recruiting and filling the stadium every week. Franklin managed to do that. A lot of fans, alumni and recruits got super-excited and overlooked the challenges that were in front of them. Also, the Big Ten and the recruiting landscape changed rather quickly after

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